Sunday, April 10, 2011

Oops, the original blog title had the word shitdown. Noooooo, we I mean shutdown with a "u"...darn that interfering "i"!

So -- the U.S. Federal Government will open as usual tomorrow. The government shutdown was averted at the very last hour by adept negotiations of folks who allowed it to reach the brink in the first place. Thanks all around, eh? But you know, if they all did their jobs in the first place, we won't have had that nail biter close to midnight on Friday night.

Thank Congress for spiking the blood pressure of many! Don't worry, you'll get back a canned letter talking about Libya!

Apparently, it's good living on the edge. Oh, the rush and great press, too. Why sit down and do real work when you can be all drama in front of the tee-vee all day and all night talking about, ahem, yourself and your hard work on behalf of the American people?

And this is not like, the end, of course. There's the debt ceiling fight coming up in a few short weeks, then the 2012 budget fight coming up with the Ryan budget proposing cuts in the international affairs and foreign assistance by 29 percent in 2012 and 44 percent by 2016. All while increasing the defense budget by 14 percent over the same time. Read more here.

Have your sigh of relief now while you can. We all might run out of nails to bite this spring and summer as the budget battles heat up. As if we really need any more excitement to our already temperamental and wild weather this year. And it's only April. But that's the way it supposedly goes in this land of ours.

Many times this past weeks, watching the news was just disgusting bizness. I've actually ran out of words to describe such juvenile antics among our elected representatives. Sugar high, check. Self-interest, check. Kids not playing nice in the playground, check. Throw out the tee-vee -- almost did that, too, until I realized I could not afford a new tee-vee with clowns in it.

Here is NYT's Kristof calling our Congress, cowardly and junior high in the same piece. Oh, righto, dat, too, but seems mighty unfair to junior high folks.

It’s unclear where the adults are, but they don’t seem to be in Washington. Beyond the malice of the threat to shut down the federal government, averted only at the last minute on Friday night, it’s painful how vapid the discourse is and how incompetent and cowardly our leaders have proved to be.[...]Democrats excoriated Republicans for threatening to shut down the government, but this mess is a consequence of the Democrats’ own failure to ensure a full year’s funding last year when they controlled both houses of Congress.

That’s when the budget should have been passed, before the fiscal year began on Oct. 1. But the Democrats were terror-stricken at the thought of approving spending bills that Republicans would criticize. So in gross dereliction of duty, the Democrats punted.

Republicans say they’re trying to curb government spending and rescue the economy — but they threatened to shut down the government, even though that would have been both expensive and damaging to our economy.

The shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996 cost the federal government more than $1.4 billion, the Office of Management and Budget reported at the time. Much of that sum was for salaries repaid afterward for work that employees never did because they were on furlough. There were also lost fees at national parks and museums: tigers must be fed at the zoo, even if nobody is paying to see them. [...]What does all this mean? That we’re governed by self-absorbed, reckless children. Further evidence comes from a new study showing that American senators devote 27 percent of their press releases to “partisan taunts” rather than substance. “Partisan taunting seems to play a central role in the behavior of many senators,” declared the study, by Justin Grimmer of Stanford and Gary King of Harvard.

A bewildered Chinese friend asked me how the world’s leading democracy could be so mismanaged that it could shut down. I couldn’t explain. This budget war reflects inanity, incompetence and cowardice that are sadly inexplicable.